Academic Collaboration Environment

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Academic Collaboration Environment

• Christine J. Jones
• Colleen S. Whitney
• May 12, 2006

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Problem

• Diverse resources and tools for
• gathering
• organizing
• sharing
• Needs vary from
• discipline to discipline
• individual to individual

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Project Overview Goal

• Architecture to support academic community
• Support multiple tasks
• Search multiple, diverse resources
• Manage resources
• Add metadata
• Share lists and annotations with others
• Reuse and extend material

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Project Phases

• Preliminary project scope
• Literature review
• Needs assessment
• Comparative tool survey
• Information modeling
• Refined scope and requirements
• Architecture
• Lightweight prototype

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Literature Review

• Networked applications
• Digital libraries
• Computer-mediated communication (CMC)
• Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW)
• Scholarly work practice

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User Needs Assessment

• Defined audience
• Conducted interviews
• Created personas
• Constructed use cases and scenarios

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Comparative Technology

• Surveyed existing tools
• Assessed them based on broad functional groupings
• Considered each for integration into ACE

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Functional Groupings

• Search
• Scholars Box
• Object/project management
• Firefox Scholar, Web Scrapbook
• Sharing/reusing content
• RefWorks/RefShare, Student Vision

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Functional Groupings

• Annotating/tagging/bookmarking
• CiteULike, Connotea
• Collaboration
• Sakai, Bspace
• Personalization/customization
• Zojam, Protopage

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Information Modeling

• Broader community
• REST, SOAP
• OpenSearch
• Library community
• SRU, SRW
• Z39.50
• OAI

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Results Structure

• Web pages
• URL
• Description
• Title

• Bibliographic records
• ISBN/ISSN
• Title(s)
• Author(s)
• Publication date
• Publisher
• Notes
• Language
• Format
• ...

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Results Schemas

• Custom XML schemas
• MarcXML
• MODS
• Dublin Core

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Requirements

• Defined terminology
• Search tool
• Item
• Project
• Collection
• Prioritized functionality

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Requirements

• Core
• Personalized Workspace
• Search
• Save and annotate items
• Manage personal projects

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Requirements

• Important
• View selected items in multiple formats
• Create, customize default list of searchable
  resources
• Export metadata
• Search the workspace (within or across projects)
  for specific items

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Requirements

• Desirable
• Create, customize tailored lists of searchable
  resources
• Create and manage user groups
• Share projects with one or more groups (read,
  read/write access)
• Invoke a browser bookmarklet to add a new item to
  one or more projects while browsing

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Requirements

• Nice
• Locate new searchable resources by browsing or
  searching

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Overview
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ACE Prototype

• Lightweight prototype
• Core functionality only
• MySQL, PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript

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Challenges

• Defining a common language
• Scoping the project
• Technical challenges
• Prioritization

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Future Work

• Iterative UI Design
• Integrate local items
• Enhanced export and rendering
• Support for sharing and collaboration

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Thanks to.....

• Ray Larson
• Anya Kartavenko
• Minakshi Mukherjee
• Kim Carl
• Peter Brantley
• Patricia Martin